Microsofts 3D video team always put all this effort into making the uis look good and fluid but it's all just fantasy, the disconnect between what the marketing team is saying it is and what the reality of their software is jarring.
The video is way too fast, I could barely tell what was going on. If you scroll past the video, the feature screenshots and animations are way more compelling.
It's also not practical example of it's use, if I'm going to be using that tool to make a book about "baking ideas", I'd expect to have actual photos of the food I'm making in the book, is that too much to ask for?
Maybe that's supposed to be showing "mock ups" or something?
I think they made it pretty clear this is a tool to confront the "blank canvas" problem, aka writer's block. For me, this has been the best use of tools like stable diffusion and chatgpt; when I'm trying to be creative, I just start typing in the text box, and then with a few prods from the AI the ideas start flowing.
You need to have a very good idea what the proposition is in order to interpret what the video is showing. The video looks like it's showing a video designer or a 3d interface designer.
It's selling a concept in a way that's very well in-keeping with the spirit of the age, all chrome.
I'm not sure that that's due to an improvement in Teams, it's probably more the formation of scar tissue that's offering a bit of respite. But something else might suddenly happen to rip the scab off and you'll be right back where you started.
One time I decided that I wanted to edit the dictionary used by Teams because I was tired of getting a spelling underline when I use contractions. Apparently, the dictionary didn't include contractions.
Anyway, many rabbit holes later, I found out that Teams uses an undocumented hard-coded call to the dictionary used by Google Chrome. You cannot edit the dictionary, you cannot supplement it with a custom dictionary, and you cannot modify the hard-code address or use a different dictionary. You can't even turn off this call.
And don't get me started on how Teams ignores every UI standard that other Windows programs use, and it's basically not modifiable in any way.
I grimaced when we started using Slack back in 2016: those ~200ms UI delays between switching conversation tabs (and the ~3s freezes when switching accounts) were incredibly grating - but we hoped they’d fix the worst user-facing parts of Electron (and the excessive RAM usage) but 7 years later it’s still as bad as it’s always been.
I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave.
I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong here. When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward.
I was in the "Alte Pinoteke" in Munich, Germany, on Sunday. It is a fabulous gallery full of huge and old master paintings.
There was a certain 4 frame series with each frame about 5m long by 3m high. Each was an architectural study of Rome with each being from a different view direction. What struck me was the text written below the paintings which indicated that the artist, after *3 years of work*, had been quoted that he was sick of the job and wished that the process would be now over. 3 years to produce 4 images so that some aristocrat could hang it on his wall and be reminded of his holiday adventure.
The distance between this state of the world, where to make a representation of reality (unreality) at the highest levels of fidelity would take years to achieve, versus what is now possible with digital cameras and AI image generation is staggering. Now anybody can create a Mona Lisa and have it hung in their own toilet to admire. Is this a bad thing that ordinary people have access to the tools to create content vs the old way where only the very very rich could afford to pay a master for three years to produce a few images?
I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content".
> I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content".
Which of those technologies were based on billions of copyright violations? And of course this copyright still exists but is only enforced in one direction, just like on YouTube where random corporations can claim copyright on any video and hurt the income of actual creators without negative consequences. AI will likely not improve this situation.
I'll think differently about that comparison if it is possible for random people to legally train models & create images from Disney's intellectual property on affordable hardware. But I don't have any false hope that equivalent enforcement of copyright will be a reality in the foreseeable future.
What's the infringement? You can't copyright style, no? If artists can look at each others copyright-in-full-force works and then imitate it, why can't AI?
Corporations having too much power is different from technology encroaching on previously uniquely human faculties.
Of course both are phenomena that ought to be addressed by society. At which point we see that it's a political problem, and of course politics is broken.
> I'll think differently about that comparison if it is possible for random people to legally train models & create images from Disney's intellectual property on affordable hardware.
... that's a very strange set of criteria. that said, last year one of my designer friends tried Midjourney, one of the pictures was so and so in Star Wars style.
Of course generating pictures is different from using them, let's say in ads.
> If artists can look at each others copyright-in-full-force works and then imitate it, why can't AI?
AI can reconstruct many training images in surprising detail. Show me an artist who can draw you an image they practiced on 10 years ago including the rough shape of the watermark.
> Of course generating pictures is different from using them, let's say in ads.
Microsoft's Copilot is a paid service, same with OpenAI's upcoming ChatGPT Plus subscription. Nobody here claims that it's illegal to draw Mickey Mouse and hang it on your fridge, but those AI models aren't trained just for fun. If Microsoft is allowed to make money from ignoring countless license terms I should be allowed to make my own short film trained with Disney cartoons and sell it. But we all know how well that would turn out.
> Show me an artist who can draw you an image they practiced on 10 years ago including the rough shape of the watermark.
I can't but that doesn't mean there are none. For music we have a lot of examples of artists who can copy perfectly. For visual arts we have people who take a helicopter tour of a city and then draw it in amazing detail.
Yes, time discounts everything for humans. That doesn't mean human artists don't cargo-cult watermark-like things. (One example is putting text/symbols on clothes that the designer doesn't bother to understand.)
> Copilot and MickeyMouse
This thread started by someone commenting about paintings in the Alte Pinakotheke, then about Disney.
Now it's language models.
Obviously they are different, but what's more important is that copying is more clear-cut in code, less degrees of freedom compared to visuals.
That said, at this point it's important to discuss how copyright works. You can look at someone's code. You can copy the style. Let's say you never saw functional code, you see a lot of it, then you learn functional style. Neat. But you can't copy the Haskell standard library 1:1 without infringing.
If Copilot produces Haskell stdlib, the copyright holders can sue.
And of course that's again where politics comes in. Since this is a new phenomena that disadvantages many small copyright holders this is where society ought to step in and help them to enforce their copyrights.
(So it's important to note that copyright and the license terms don't kick in if it's not a derived work. And that's the discussion we should be having. Maybe as a quick hotfix society should tweak copyright law and make it more broad in terms of what it considers a derivative. We can also put in the specifier that "except for humans, if you swear you did not use an artificial neural net" or whatever. I don't think this makes much of a difference, unfortunately. AI - and other kinds of technological changes - makes a lot of existing inequality problems worse. The general solution is to fix the inequalities. Of course if politics were actually representative of people's needs the inequalities were also likely inconsequential.)
I think the point here is that now you can. Your "AI" can draw it for you with extreme accuracy and then... is it yours? That's the real question here. Pretty simple.
What if we had a copyright law that did give like a percent of detail that has to be different, so you make a new drawing that has the required amount of difference, and it's yours right? Now your "AI" can be trained to make differences in drawings that specifically meet the requirement of however much difference between the original and yours will negate the ability of the original author to make a copyright claim. Pretty straightforward. It's not the case now, but when we have enough content that has to be judged by humans on whether or not it falls under copyright... Anyhoo... I'm not selling content, so I shouldn't care, right?</snark>
Are we equating the capabilities of humans and AI now? AI isn't "imitimating" it's synthesizing an output, in seconds, based on a giant database of art scraped from the internet by human researchers, without permission from those artists, to be crystallized in a form that will outlive every artist born and yet born till the heat death of the universe.
If copyright doesn't distinguish between that then copyright needs updated. It's a tool, not a person, and one that people want to use commercially so they can create the billion pieces of art to train it on themselves.
One one hand I support authors' rights to place restrictions on their art for a limited time. (Not the current forever + 75 years.) So let them draw whatever lines they want in the sand.
Because otherwise there's no general good way to delineate generative AI from other tools. It's a very fast magic brush. (You might have seen timelapse videos of artists do a digital painting. It's already pretty magical. Especially to me, because I can't even draw to eggs to match.)
Any copyright currently is about the not-for-free right to _copy_, imitate-right on the other end, still has to be invented. I don't see how that would work in practice.
AI isn't "imitating" anything. Imitation is a conscious effort a human makes. Any artist could try copying someone's style by looking at a piece of art.
AI can't look at an image and say "I'll imitate that". A human "trains" an AI on images to create a model of how X looks with different examples and piecemeals together something that looks new but is in fact a million tiny data copies from all the images it was trained on so the original source cant be detected. The AI can't do anything it hasn't been trained on.
As I understand it, while it may not copy the exact image it has copied data associated with the image in a way that copyright law could never have anticipated.
So the solution is simple, train your models on your own stuff if you want to claim copyright to the work commercially or pay artists for your training data.
It always boils down to the same question when discussing a.i. Is there a difference between people's imagination (producing art that is considered new, but is unmistakably influenced by existing pieces of art) and copying/transforming and stitching together pieces of existing art? In a few years from now, probably nobody can tell the difference anymore.
Same question holds for the reasoning and intelligence capabilities of a.i. Soon we can't tell the difference in at least several knowledge/skill domains. Is there any difference, will become a hypothetical question.
Even if there was no difference at all in the process of image generation between AI and humans I would argue humans and AI should not be held to the same standard of law (and we're not even talking about true AI).
A human that copies someone will die. An AI can live, multiply, and be improved forever. Humans will never compete against anything they wind up being capable of. Society is built for humans not AI.
>Which of those technologies were based on billions of copyright violations?
All of them, no one is reinventing the wheel every time something new is made, every invention is based on the inventions that proceeded it, it's how human society advances and learns.
I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights :
> the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.
I read some year ago that this kind of thing applies to New York as well, that was in the context of an open-world Spider-Man game featuring NY skylines.
France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?
Fun fact, the Eiffel Tower architecture is not protected since 1990, but the lighting is. So it's illegal to use commercialy a night time photo of the tower[1][2].
I don't think anybody has ever been sued but the SETE (Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) do make money with the image.
This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.
There is a reason the art you were looking at was in a museum, and images generated by AI tools is not.
There is something impressive and inspiring about the process those artists went through, embedded in the physical work itself. Like we are impressed watching someone running a marathon, even though they could cover the same distance much more quickly in a car.
But you aren't saying that "Google trying to build a self-driving car is the biggest triple-E (Embrace Extend Extinguish) bait-and-switch in its history and completely unfair on marathon runners who, if it had any morals, it would be striving to pay".
By way of OpenAI, Microsoft is attempting the biggest triple-E bait-and-switch in its history—this time not against open-source developers but anyone who was silly enough to share creative work in the open.
Worst of all, the majority here seems to be hailing them for this.
My take as to what exactly has gone wrong here is that it’s loss of attribution. I think this is quite intentional: given relevant metadata, the network could obviously be instrumented to reflect and credit the artists whose works contributed to the final derivative in excess of some threshold. However, Microsoft would rather the public thought it is impossible—since otherwise they’d be on the hook to pay those artists-turned-unwilling-ghost-content-creators on whose work they are now capitalizing.
Yes, it would be all good if they just tracked attribution and organized micro-payments and opt-out for the artists they are leveraging.
"Here's the list of artists contributing to your work not already in compensated libraries such as Getty. Your bill is $X.XX and 70% of your payment will go to these artists in this proportion [list]".
Instead MS is just pocketing it. It isn't like they lack the funds and hardware/software resources to also implement backtracing...
Perhaps what should be advocated is use this for idea generation then present it as part of the design brief to get local designers and artists to do a genuine creative work. And give them credit on the published result.
This is just the way of capitalism, and it's how the entire economy works. I mean, you're so concerned with the artists work being stolen, but what of the scientists? Yes, the art produced by Stable Diffusion isn't possible without the artists, but it's also not possible without the countless scientists who have worked over decades to get this technology to where it is. I didn't hear artists complaining when they were happily using technologies developed by people who were not compensated when their work was productized by corporations.
Where is their attribution? Should we expect Microsoft and OpenAI et al. to list the authors of the papers they used to work through the technical aspects of their product? Should all of the open source projects they leveraged be attributed and compensated? If we are going to ask Microsoft to share profits with artists, shouldn't we also ask them to share profits with scientists and open source devs?
Arguably, yes! But if so, then the focus on the poor artists being robbed is misplaced. If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too. It's a much larger problem than just artists -- it's that corporations capture all of the downstream benefits of upstream content/science/technology developments, and then refuse to reinvest at a proportional rate back into the system that allowed them to profit so handsomely. This applies to the scientists and the artists.
So yes, be mad at what Microsoft is doing. But the solution isn't to get them to pay artists, that doesn't fix anything. If we want actual change, we need to fundamentally reimagine the relationship between corporations and the rest of us. If the only way to get there is for corporations to screw over more people until enough wake up, then so be it.
Scientists are generally paid, at least with public grant money or corporate sponsorship, or by working in corp labs.
Artists and writers generally earn their living by selling their works. If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
This is like MS scanning all Open-Source code and generating PROPRIETARY results from that code.
Like the art, it was shared or published WITHOUT permission for commercial re-use.
Yet, here is Microsoft, hijacking and commercially re-using it. This is effectively stealing without permission or compensation. None of the artists consented for this type of re-use, especially packaged such that it would literally erase their ability to make a living.
MS has a very cool product here, except for this wholesale systematic theft.
My overall point is that if we're going to start asking for handouts due to a rearrangement of the social order, then we can't start and stop the discussion at artists and stable diffusion type technologies.
> If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
Sort of. Most people actively doing the hard labor in scientific fields are in fact Ph.D. students, who are paid meager stipends, if anything. They also frequently literally starve due to how little they are paid. And yet, it's their hard work that goes into published papers, which then are read by engineers (read: highly-compensated millionaires), who then implement those ideas into production code, which is sold for profit.
Further, much of the scientific process is actually volunteer work. I don't peer edit and review for free, in my spare time, just so Microsoft has an easier time reading the papers that pass through my inbox. I do it because the scientific process requires it, and this is the process we've decided on as a society. But maybe in the future, all scientific research will be for-profit, paid access only. That's the way it will be if the profit keeps getting captured by corporations without proportional taxes being paid back into the system.
> Scientists are generally paid, at least with public grant money
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is the scientists who are paid with grant money are the lucky ones, because the pie is so small. So many other scientists are doing side jobs, hustling, and giving up their dream to be a scientist because the opportunities to make a living in this field are so few and far between. Being a scientist supported by a grant or corporation is a lot like being an artist with a patron, actually.
And why is it this way? The pie is so small to begin with because science is generally not profitable, and so research cannot fund itself. Nonetheless, we as a society feel that scientific research is a worthwhile endeavor, so we fund science, and tax corporations who use the fruits of science industrially. Those funds will then be reinvested into more science.
But now Microsoft and the rest of the big corps don't want to pay their taxes, yet they still want to freely incorporate public-funded research into their for-profit technology products. If that plays out, well who is going to fund the science? The scientists can't, the public won't, the corporations won't.
Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards?
Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
> If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too.
Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
> Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards?
Was it paid? How do you know? A lot of research is done by Ph.D. students, who are paid if you're lucky. Often though they are in fact paying for a degree.
Moreover, science and art are often held as two sides of the same coin, because they are both fields that don't generate profit, yet society has deemed socially necessary enough to fund them. So even though scientists and artists are held to be opposites personality wise, the roles they play in society are actually very similar. This means their works are also exploited in a similar way.
> Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
We could accurately say that Microsoft is profiting off of research done by students who go uncompensated. If a starving artist should be paid because their drawing went into a diffusion model that Microsoft profits off of, why shouldn't a starving student who wrote a paper that MS read to create their diffusion model be compensated as well?
> Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
Well, that's one of the problems isn't it? Microsoft doesn't have to disclose or attribute any of the works that went into the production of this technology. But in the general case, if you walk through the OpenAI offices, you'll find stacks of research papers, whose authors are listed readily on those papers. If the artists get in on a royalty cut, I don't see why every one of those authors shouldn't as well (and for that matter all the open source devs whose code is running on their systems).
While most works of are re-combinations (up in the how many 9s after 99% region?), it is pretty hard to say that there has never been a new idea. Humanity has come from apes without art, up to modern digital art painted with lasers in the sky with drones.... From cave painting through Greek & Roman art, through Renaissance through modern art, and it's not merely new mediums for the same painting (and even so, "the medium is the message", so there's new stuff there). Same for music, text, etc...
This is a very interesting discussion. Now zoom in into your understanding of "new idea". You can also call it "refinement of existing idea". "New" can be (and maybe always is? ) a combination or transformation of "existing". Just like any number is a combination of other numbers.
So, if we're to establish (I won't say "prove") the idea of [everything is transformation], we'd need to sort out the list of primitives, which are being re-combined.
Conversely, for the [some things are really new], we'd have to find the new items. That said, the new items will almost popup in the context of other transformations, e.g., a new innovation in painting would still likely occur within some more normal transformations.
Take for example the Abstract Art movement, which was about painting not representations of real things, but exploring the elements of form, color, line, texture, but not painting people or landscapes (or only doing so in a very abstract way). So, painting a person on a digital medium vs oil & canvas or watercolor is a transformation. But my sense is that some of these abstract artists were actually digging down into the lower levels of subconscious visual processing, where the initial processing is to find edges, colors, movement, textures, and this was entirely new in the history of painting.
What about concepts, from the flat earth to the round earth, from geocentricism to heliocentrism, to no special location in the universe, or from earth-water-fire-air to alchemy, to structure-of-the-atom-based chemistry? Are there no new ideas here, or are they just out of scope?
To your example, is any number just a combination of other numbers? The concept of Zero didn't exist for a long time in recorded history (how long is debated). What about negative numbers, imaginary numbers? Do we consider these new or combinations?
Or, are we just discussing the Ship of Theseus, a fundamentally unsolvable question that depends on our concept of "new"? (still a fun rabbit hole!)
1. You know that these tools are known to sometimes output a result that is 1:1 copy of a work from training data. Even those cases aside, in many (most?) cases a few or even one specific artist served as the source (sometimes the prompt is specifically created that way).
2. Human mind can recombine all it wants. It’s called a homage, a reproduction, or a cover. When a software tool does that automated and at scale, though, it is copyright violation.
I don't think anything has gone wrong. Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill - if you can be replaced by something better, eventually you will be.
It's still kind of sad for the people who are affected though (when/if they are affected? kind of hasn't happened yet).
"Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill"
Progress isn't ruthless. People are ruthless. People make these decisions, weighing the profits against the ethical concerns and potential impact on society. It's not some platonic form pulling the trigger.
I could argue that cloning myself and forcing myselves into indentured servitude to build my space kingdom on Mars is "progress" but perhaps that is more technological progress than societal progress and therefore undesirable.
As far as being replaced, we'll all be replaced at some point so what's the end game look like? Is it "progress" for humanity or AI? Are we just manufacturing
our own obsolescence?
In this case, at least so far, "better" means faster and cheaper.
Personally I don't see AI itself as the problem, in many ways it's just tech optimising for the shitty hole we have created for ourselves. Can't say I'm too optimistic that it will help us step out of that hole and into more meaningful roles , but perhaps it's exactly the jolt we needed.
Very related, am I the only one who finds it funny corp lingo for human artists is "content creators", and what AI is spitting out is called "art"?
The same argument was made when player pianos came out, when records came out, when radio came out, when photography came out, when TV came out, yet there are likely more performers in every one of these categories than ever.
Making content production and duplication cheaper enables more people to consume it, requiring more of it, and more people end up working on the new systems. I suspect these tools will be no different.
Art isn't a quantitative but qualitative activity. Just consuming more media cheaply is hardly a good thing. If anything we already waste too much time on forgettable, generic media as passive consumers at the expense of health or social life. Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars.
This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
All of those arguments have been used for every change in society for thousand of years. For example:
>discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens
Same was said for pants over dresses, for radio, for tv, for rock and roll, for video games, for dancing, for co-ed schools, for educating women, for cameras, for electricity, for catalog ordering, and on and on, with literally the same arguments, the same studies, the same downfall of society, and this has been repeated in cultures the world over as they evolve. With all these terrible decreases in teen life compounding for hundreds to thousands of years, it's amazing they do so well today compared to generations past.
It's also nice when people put their beliefs, created from their upbringing, on the next generation, ignoring that each has adapted and evolved with new changes and each does turn out ok, and for the most part with much better lives.
Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons - over time society tends to mitigate the cons and adopt the pros, and today will likely be the same pattern.
>Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons
I actually did, you didn't which is why you're engaging in whig history. Today roughly one in six youths is obese. 10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication. Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide. Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade. All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist. If you look at actual data there are huge losses in quality of life, some having continued for decades. The tech utopianism in the face of clear evidence is pathological and imaginary. Vague arguments about "thousands of years of history" (do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history')? don't constitute an argument, that's just fantasy.
And that report points out the correlation between general teen happiness and various internet uses is ~ -0.1, which is pretty weak, with plenty of citations of research backing it up.
>Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade
So you can cherry pick all the ills you want, blame them on whatever current boogey man there is, but that same argument has been used for all the things I mentioned above. The correlations, and certainly the causes, are no where near as clear in the research data on these topics.
> Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars.
It doesn't really matter what you, me or the public thinks. If you set up a system that constantly forces people to optimize for lowest cost and highest profits without concern for other things, you eventually will end up with a race to the bottom, where content does cost zero monies.
And that's the system most of us live in today. There is seemingly nothing else to do about than to join the rat race, otherwise you get left behind and on the streets. You can try to fight it, but eventually capitalism will overrun you, either by force and sneakily. It eats everything around you.
Capitalism and globalism was supposed to be the system that forced everyone to be friends via trade, because why would you hurt your trading partner? Instead we got what we have today, which might be less violent, but maybe the same amount of cruel.
The argument in the past was "cut out entirely," which never ended up being true, and is not going to be true this time. These tools will enable artists a new medium, just like every time in the past. Photography didn't put an end to artists specializing in realistic art. Radio didn't kill live music. AI won't kill artists making art.
>When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward.
The vast majority of the image generation crowd are (surprise surprise) adamantly against paying artists for training materials.
What has gone wrong is that AI researchers and futurologists have warned for decades that AIs replacing jobs was coming (though everybody was taken by surprise that artists would be first) and that we needed to change our paradigms about labor quickly.
We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work.
Now incentives are on the other way: everyone tries (understandably) to make it as hard as possible to be replaced but this just leads to a world of bullshit jobs pretending to be useful while the AIs do all the heavy lifting.
We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work.
Completely disagree with this view, especially when it comes to art.
This is not advancing society, or art, or anything, it's a freaking knock off factory that's been developed and used for commercial gain. It's not the same as manual loom weavers being replaced, this is a way to steal peoples stuff with little trace or accountability. This is legal trash and MS has plenty of lawyers to make you feel otherwise.
I was playing with it today and I couldn't believe the crap I was seeing. Nearly every single known artist is known because they developed a unique style, and worked to develop that style. They didn't just copy other peoples stuff and sell it. To make a machine that just rips off peoples styles and then you charge money for it is freaking lame as and I really hope they get sued hard for it, actually they should be taxed to pay for all the fantasy retirement money you speak of.
Do you know that throughout history there has been many, many artists who made counterfeit art works for money? There has been many, many print shops ripping off work etc. This is absolutely no different to automating that same level of theft. In my opinion, what's going on there isn't even really that original.
This isn't just about research or advancing anything, because it's not. It takes much and gives back very little. If it was for research, do it in a university, generate some new cool things with it and leave it at that. Having a machine which can just "draw this and do a half ass job at ripping off someone who worked hard to create something cool", what a low blow.
Disclaimer: I'm not an artist, so it's not personal, I just now bullshit when I see it, and that thing is bullshit, regardless of the technology behind it.
> "Nearly every single known artist is known because they developed a unique style, and worked to develop that style. They didn't just copy other peoples stuff and sell it. To make a machine that just rips off peoples styles and then you charge money for it is freaking lame as and I really hope they get sued hard for it."
Because when you drink Cherry Cola or eat Cherry Bakewell Tart, your first thought is to the chemist who worked hard to make the synthetic flavour, and then criticism to the company that just "copies other peoples stuff and sells it" hoping they get sued hard for it?
I also think it’s a matter of scale, I guess you’re staying a company has stolen another companies flavouring formulae, and used it for their own devices, which does seem like ripping something off, anyway…I shouldn’t and don’t care in that case so I shouldn’t care when artists work is is used to profit off without paying them royalties ? ..
Art, in terms of creating a beautiful rendition of some part of the real world or even a fantastical but recognizable scene has not been a big part of the mainstream capital-A Art market for over a hundred years. Nobody cares if you can paint really well or whatever. Art schools churn out thousands of people a year who can do that.
Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept rather than a nice painting.
Now if ChatGPT can churn out convincing BS about why taping a banana to a wall or something is a piece of revolutionary art, then artists will really be in trouble.
Every time I hear this sentiment expressed I wonder about the speaker's familiarity with history and economics. The labor theory of value is almost a thousand years old and has been pretty thoroughly discredited for nearly the same amount of time. History is full of artisans who discovered just how much they overestimated the value of their skill only after someone came along and found a way to do the same thing more efficiently. I wonder how many tears were shed for the buggy whip craftsmen? The argument that this is different because this is art doesn't work either, because the endeavor's value is regularly quantified in USD - despite attempts to frame it as a non-commercial, almost spiritual, activity.
I have to agree and to be honest, I was having an objective go of Mid Journey today, honestly, I think it's kind of underwhelming. I know I'm not supposed to say that but it was mixed feelings for me, kind of amazing, but also a lot of regurgitation. The model seems to have it's own style it has trouble escaping for a lot of the images requested.
I mean it's amazing that image can be generated from text but honestly, you have to take what you can get, it has it's own "style" you need to just accept what it gives you, even if you prompt it for a long time. There seem to be certain cases where it really excels and others where it just fails really hard. It was interesting to see the way people were trying to use it and how far off the mark it was.
However, what really struck me though is how it's such a blatant rip off factory. I asked it to generate some images of musicians I like as sketches, and in some cases it was reproducing famous posters etc and in styles and with similar outlines to those I've seen before. Then the way it takes "styles" of say Ghibli studio and rips it off is just, trash.
Most artists just wouldn't do that, they might imitate a style for study, borrow ideas for inspiration (of course) but a professional / respectful artist would develop their own style not to rip someone off so hard.
It's quite ridiculous the thing is legal. IMO MS PR must be going into over time convincing us this is all ok.
I can't wait till people start ripping off MS product with it and see how they feel.
Those who make the argument not allowing this to continue because it's holding back "AI" have really drunk the cool aid. It's fine people research, but to charge money for using other peoples work like that, it's disgusting.
I'd say most artists would be ok to lend their art to AI to actually improve and push the boundaries of art itself, but this whole "draw me a scene from x movie, or copy blah's style so I can use it for anything, including commercial purposes", what a load of crap, ha.
I went through the same exercise recently, and came to a different conclusion. I’m blown away, and I can see how this is the future, and it’s a good thing.
While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going.
As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical.
I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked.
- Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations.
- Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation.
- Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this!
The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists!
The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster.
Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.
You're conflating the two concepts sorry, there is using new technologies to make art, I totally see the merit and value in this. Then there is making money from other peoples work, making a knock off machine.
A service exists which allows people to rip off other artists work and pass it off as their own and hide that fact in the fact it's "generated".
Some artists styles are so prolific, so great that if you're just lazily having ChatGPT generate that for you then using it for commercial gain, or not crediting them, that's theft in my view.
I'm not talking about new technologies that enable new types of art, I'm talking about a platform that enables mass scale rips offs.
I'd feel completely different about it if artists were able to lend their art works to the training model voluntarily for training and even receive some royalties overtime. In fact, I think that's a pretty cool business idea.
I don’t think I’m conflating anything. What I’m saying is that the tool is there now, and while it can be used to blatantly rip off other people’s work, the tool can also be used creatively, and in a way that doesn’t rip anyone off.
So while the ripping off isn’t great, that’s something which can be fixed, and you’ve given a great suggestion on how to do so. But in the meantime, the tech is advancing, and digging in our heels isn’t an option. The upside is far too great to society imo. The legal and social environment will normalize around it, but it isn’t going away.
As soon as I saw that part of page I thought, "oh shit." All I can think about these days is all the parts of my job that will be automated away by AI, until there's no longer a reason to employ me.
To offer counter perspective, how is this different than any craftmanship being replaced for centuries by mass scale factories and automation. Is this is just the last wave of workforce displacement by automation?
Steven Zapata has a really good video on Youtube about "the end of art". He offers this analogy:
If a factory worker at a car manufacturing plant was handed a screwdriver, and he claimed it was "replacing" him, we would know that he is incorrect; it is a tool designed to make him more productive. But the day they rolled out the robotic assembly lines, however, he was correct: those were designed to replace him. And they did. And now he lives in the Rust Belt with a degraded quality of life and few job prospects because he didn't just lern 2 code.
Yeah,
a tool = increased productivity => output = worker time x multiplier
a robot = automation => output = machine time (without human) + worker time (part that cannot yet be automated)
I also don't like where this is going, and can't see any way to make it stop. Maybe some of these illustrators may see their job evolve from content creation to AI training through their art / vision.
It's still bad enough imo when it comes to respecting copyright / intellectual property, so not a surprise at all they're doing this to illustrators now :/ Not that they're the only ones doing it these days, admittedly.
What artists? They will just move to physical art pieces and charge more for that once commissioned to do that. This only affects digital artists; not those who do physical art, sculptures and hard back paintings.
HN only tells me that almost none of you have even visited a modern art museum.
Many snarky comments here because, Microsoft + AI.
Maybe, but I don't think this is looking to replace stable diffusion or DALL-E.
This is going after Canva and if it gets bundled into your existing 365 subscription it can be a compelling offer for millions of SMEs and consumers on that stack already (especially if it integrates well with Word/Outlook/etc).
I wonder if they are going after Canva or Figma. Feels like once you hit a certain revenue threshold, all the GAFAM/GAMMA are putting effort to put you down.
That’s capitalism 101, but in 50 years from now, it might be really hard to start a software company. GAMMA would have eaten just about everything.
This definitely feels like Canva / Adobe Express (used to be Spark), the examples they show in the video feel like they want you to use it for social media posts.
Difference I can spot is that Canva / Adobe Express charge $1 for a human-made premium asset (while offering a pretty good free selection), while Microsoft charges for AI-generated assets (notice "remove watermark" at 00:24).
I had the opportunity to try it out but it doesn't offer any purpose other than "generate instagram post with some inaccurate image generation". It feels like nothing more than a limited Canva with a sub-par version of Dall-E 2. Every other design tool offers way faster workflows, even for non-designers. Currently Microsoft Designer is requiring too much intuition and pre-planning on the user's part for a meaningful and optimized workflow. Currently this solves nothing. The UI looks great though (don't know about UX, it's kinda like web3-we-dont-know-what-to-do-it-with-yet)
The current design ideas in MS products are terrible so I doubt how much AI can help that.
I AM curious to see how design tools evolve to work with all this new AI tech being integrated. I wonder how long is left before pixel pushing is just for final polish and a designer's role shifts to focus on properly explaining the nuance of a problem to a chatbot.
Some divisions seem to have a coherent visual design strategy like Office and, to a lesser extent, DeDiv (though obviously hamstrung by lacking time to update all the old dialogs). The Windows Org, though, is a mess - and I also fault the upper-execs for not bashing their heads together.
I think there’s only been two points in the company’s history when the stars aligned and all their main products (Windows, Office, Visual Studio) were aesthetically coherent: 1998 and 2005.
Remember the days when most people who were on the internet could build their own websites? And those were rather unique, sometimes quaint and sincere? And you didn’t need a help from a solar-system-engulfing corporation to accomplish that?
What if I told you that it is still possible? Or, have we as the tech community “succeeded” in making the barrier of entry so much higher?
I think Silverlight was trying to compete with Flash. This Designer product seems very different - it seems to be an attempt at image generation and integration into a desktop publishing application.
"Windows 11 calculator is creating many problems such as the app surprisingly crashes, opens then immediately closes, or not performs as expected. Some people complain that the built-in Microsoft Store application does not work after they have received an update." [1]
The fact that there are 14 ways to fix the Calculator app listed in this article, including even "Disable Windows Firewall temporarily", is simply beyond any sort of rant.
Somewhat off-topic, listened recently to Computers Barely Work - Interview with Linux Legend Greg Kroah-Hartman [2] and, as hubristic and cliché as it is, the takeaway was: we must delete every software, destroy every CPU ever made, and start all over again.
The blog post you linked does not look very trustworthy. Many of these steps are generic Windows troubleshooting steps, with some clearly dumb ones thrown in. There are tons of sites that produce troubleshooting articles like this one for just about anything in Windows (although one of the steps is usually to use some product they're advertising). Googling for "windows 11 calculator crashing reddit" brings a total of two posts, so it's nowhere near widespread, and probably not a real problem.
It was indeed the second link I clicked after a summary search. Personally, I have not used the Windows Calculator app in a decade or so, but I blame Microsoft for other thousands of hours of pointless eye strain trying to fix and get work done through their applications. Still, I don't think one is unreasonable to expect that a calculator app should never crash after an update or be a nuisance if it's made by a 1.89 trillion USD market cap company with over 100,000 software engineers on payroll and aspirations to open the new world of statistically learned agents.
Nevertheless, as pointed out by Greg Kroah-Hartman and others, our stack is extremely feeble, so it becomes reasonable to expect the unreasonable from time to time, even with somewhat trivial applications.
As I said, I don’t think many people experienced Windows Calculator not working. Is it completely impossible? No, because computers are weird sometimes.
But all three articles are just spam. The writers of those articles definitely did not experience nor fix Calculator crashing, they just took their template “how to fix [modern Windows] $application” post and replaced $application with Calculator. You can also find similarly absurd posts for macOS [0], with the fixes being very generic and applicable to any app (force quit, safe mode, update the OS), workarounds (use Spotlight Search), and one user error fix (disable RPN mode). And, oh look, GNOME Calculator on Ubuntu can break as well [1] (but to be fair, that one’s caused by the ridiculous Snap obsession of Ubuntu).
I mentioned Greg Kroah-Hartman's interview specifically to point out a greater issue and to not fall into a flamewar: my calculator app is better than yours. Just as a mention, my favorite calculator app is a bash function:
function calc {
python3 -c "from math import *; print($*)"
}
and then simply call:
calc "5 + cos(pi)"
it never fails, even if computers are weird, and there are no spam articles on how to fix it since there is nothing to fix.
Microsoft also seem keen to deprecate two other simple Windows applications - Paint (being replaced with "Paint 3D") and Snipping Tool (to be replaced with "Snip & Sketch"). I don't understand it, it feels like they've started with the question "ok what if we replaced $tool?" rather than "what does $tool need to do?"
Paint 3D itself was deprecated later and Paint was un-deprecated, it's just updated by the store now. (It even has a Windows 11 redesign!)
Snipping Tool was deprecated, but everything at this point was ported over to the (arguably better) "new" Snipping Tool, and it just got screen(/area) recording too.
That's what I meant -- old "Snipping Tool" was deprecated and the newer Snip & Sketch, originally forked from OneNote's screenshot utility, was renamed to "Snipping Tool".
> the takeaway was: we must delete every software, destroy every CPU ever made, and start all over again.
Understandable sentiment, but good luck doing it any better than what we currently have. Every technology and the assumptions it was based on is outdated pretty soon.
~4 billion years ago there was possibly a big refactor [1]; after the refactor the RNA machine got somewhat stable for the next 4+ billion years. There is no technology in our computer machines that will be able to withstand 4 billion years of external change. In fact, with all our clouds and AIs, we are closer to the caves than to that kind of technology. But it's great that the techno-giants of today with trillions in market cap and billions in R&D give us new drop-shadow effects: we need more riboswitch-like technology [2].
That's like saying you can easily fight climate change by reducing CO2 emissions.
It's not wrong but it ignores human behaviour and profit-oriented incentives.
I can only presume this is because Microsoft records and sends your calculator inputs to themselves. Windows is just one gigantic spyware operation. So glad I can run 99% of my daily ops on Linux
The site is a spam blog site written purely for SEO and has very little to do with the actual calculator app or offering actually useful advice. It's basically just a copy-paste text dump of every generic trouble shooting tip someone could find on the internet.
Here is a link [1] from the Microsoft forum with an advice to
...right click on Windows PowerShell and select Run as administrator.
Then type following command and press Enter key:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.WindowsCalculator | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml" -Verbose}
It's just ridiculous for a Calculator app fix, no matter how you put it.
But this command isn't about fixing the calculator app at all, it's for reregistering the application if you have removed it from your profile.
I have the new calculator app open literally all of the time and I've not run into any issues with it at all. In fact since it's been updated, it saves me from using Google searches for plenty of types of conversions too so I'd suggest the new update has been a large success.
Yes, and that makes it even more funny (and disheartening): 2023's self-fixing technology is the old classic "have you tried turning it off and on again" [1].
To name just one thing that bugs me: You can't switch modes with function keys any more. Previously you could go between Scientific,Programmer, etc. with function keys and now you have to use the miserable hamburger menu.
I absolutely hate the UI as well, but that's probably subjective. For example, why isn't the input area clearly distinct instead of blending into the surrounding with no border ?
Which Windows had the switching with Function keys? I just tested with the one from windows 7 and you switch modes with alt+number. Function keys are only used in programmer mode to switch between hex/dex. Those same shortcuts work in the new one. Same with the one from XP that has only two modes, but you can't switch between them using alt+number.
Ugh you’re right. I misremembered which combo does what. I seem to recall function keys not working in programmer mode for a while, but now I am also doubting my mental stability
Even at 800x600 it's not half the screen. Starts at about the same time as the old one. Is black on white. The old one is blue on blue. usage with mouse is the same as the old one. Even the math engine is literally the same.
Yeah, I use the Python REPL for any quick calculations - it's usually already open, it's fast and it is more flexible. I still think the default calculator should be quick and functional for those of us who don't do developer things.
It's just more randomness to pad out their Microsoft 365 offerings. It's like that horrible buffet you keep visiting because it's cheap and, well, cheap.
But done and thus stagnating. Companies hate "pretty good", "done" and stagnating. They want to offer new stuff. Enable growth. Crossselling. Upselling.
the buffet has BBQ hot wings, they're not really great hot wings but you would have to go through a lot to get really great ones, so you take this because it damps down a craving and gives an approximation of satisfaction.
Microsoft has an absolutely terrible track record in the creative productivity category to the point that their previous entrants fell somewhere between “toy” and “joke.” I don’t have high hopes here, personally.
I would wager MS Paint has done more to spark creativity and set people on a path to becoming digital artists than any other piece of software in history like Photoshop. I wouldn't underestimate the power of 'toy' programs.
The next product announcement where Microsoft incorporates AI as a central feature will cause me to roll my eyes. I expect we'll see a dozen or more of these this year. They are ultimately just repackaging models discussed here in a user friendly UI. This would look a lot more promising if Microsoft had a stronger track record for applications, which has been hit or miss.
What tool does Google have, that Microsoft Designer is trying to compete against? Closest I can imagine is the Google Photos editor, but it's not the same scope/audience at all...
At first I thought this was a Figma-like tool. I wonder if Microsoft could compete in that space, or is the UI/UX community to opinionated and outspoken to stop the classic enterprise argument?
"We're already paying $$$ to MS and we'll get a big discount / bundle deal for [MS alternative], we can't justify the cost for [better non-MS alternative]"
It is not a Figma alternative. Figma is a tool for designers to design. Microsoft Designer seems to be a tool for non-designers to attempt design, with the help of AI. Very different audiences, and trying out the tool, everything about the UI/UX makes that very clear, Microsoft Designer is more like a wizard for creating a initial design, while Figma is a proper tool.
There is hug momentum behind VSCode so it has large ammount of features. But software for editing text, that eats as much RAM as 3d software with complex model, is probably not amazing.
Did anybody else face the issue that they got a mail from Microsoft asking them to "Try Designer" however once you try to login with your account it mentions: This account doesn't exist.
I am not sure what Designer is and I wanted to check if it was a Figma/Adobe XD competitor.
I did get the email too, but didn't have the issue.
From another comment of mine:
> It is not a Figma alternative. Figma is a tool for designers to design. Microsoft Designer seems to be a tool for non-designers to attempt design, with the help of AI. Very different audiences, and trying out the tool, everything about the UI/UX makes that very clear, Microsoft Designer is more like a wizard for creating a initial design, while Figma is a proper tool.
The page completely fails to mention what is being designed here. Web pages? Documents? UIs? Images? Probably not engines or programs or clothing cuts. It looks graphic-design-y, but otherwise I have no idea what use cases this is intended for.
It make sense. With Microsoft - it is US company. With citizens same: domestic vs foreign. Like with Eurosport commentators that are rooting for British racers. In every country it is the same. But since English language is now international, we somehow expect content to be international as well.
I wish Microsoft would finish something before going off to build something else.
My team are desparate for Microsoft Loop Workspaces to launch so we can get off Notion and be integrated into one platform. Where has that project gone? Again - another jazzy page and no launch.
M$'s history is littered with these types of launches and vapourware. Someone should teach them how to manage a product properly.
and don't get me started on how they keep renaming everything, is it Cortana, is it Viva? IDFK!
Graphic designers tend not use microsoft tools. I mean , when is the last time you saw someone fire up MS Publisher for a professional graphics project?
yes but what is it? is it a take on canva + dale-2?
for a startup 'join the waitlist' makes sense - but here i don't see why, or even what for, it's unclear to me.
It's much different. As pupileater (who posted earlier in the thread and has tried it) put it, "It feels like nothing more than a limited Canva¹ with a sub-par version of Dall-E 2".
Where Figma is a tool for UI/UX designers, this (like Microsoft's WordArt) is aimed squarely at non-designers.
¹ Which is like Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark), if you're not familiar with Canva.
There are a million newsletters and other mailings sent out by random employees without any formal education in design. The kind of people who used Comic Sans and Word Art, if you still remember.
Companies that send out professionally designed mailings won't start sending half-assed AI generated stuff.
